First of all, ixnay on the faces: brand images without faces drive many more repins than images with faces.

And generally, color is good, particularly images with more than one dominant color, which are repinned 3.25 times more often than images with just one dominant color. But even though blue seems to be many people’s favorite color, it’s a bad choice for repin-seeking Pinteresters. Red images get more repins than primarily blue images, and pictures that contain a mixture of red, orange, and brown, oddly enough, are repinned twice as as often as blue images.

Which makes the header photo for this post — a decadent Loaded Baked Potato Soup at a Disney theme park– a just-about-perfect pin: It’s been repinned almost 60,000 times and liked almost 8,000 times.

To generate its guidelines for creating more-shareable pins, Curulate analyzed 30 visual characteristics of images on Pinterest, such as color, texture, size, format (portrait or landscape), and saturation (how light or dark an image is).

Another interesting finding: Never, ever post a rough-textured image to Pinterest. According to the Curulate data, images with smooth texture are repinned a massive 17 times more often than images with rough texture. In addition, to maximize repinnability of products or objects, make the shot a close-up. Imagines with less than 30 percent background are repinned most often, while images that contain 40 percent or more background are two to four times less likely to be repinned.

One more guideline: saturation.

Very light and very dark images are seldom repinned. In fact, images with medium lightness are repinned 20 times more often than mostly dark images and eight times more often than images that are mostly white.

Source: http://pinterest.com/pin/89368373825810713/

Another very pinnable post with 165 re-pins

Finally, while it’s not an image guideline, brands need to be careful that their images on Pinterest actually lead somewhere. Pinterest is the fourth-largest traffic-generating site on the Internet, but 48 percent of the most popular pins lead to expired pages on retailers’ sites.

It’s a complete waste of time to engineer the perfectly-repinnable Pinterest pin only to have it lead straight to a 404 error page on your website.

Image credits: Pinterest; Baked Potato Soup/Disney; Pinterest Cake by Shards of Blue/Flickr

Are you using video in your online marketing strategies? Did you know that 87 percent of online marketers now use video content?

Whether you’ve been creating video content for years or this is your first time, we wanted to share some tips on how to make your video stand out from the rest and go viral.

This is the first post in a series focused on helping you supercharge your online video marketing strategy. We want to demystify the meaning of the viral video and give you some concrete tips to help you make your own.

Here are our 3 steps to making a viral video.

1: Understand your audience and their viral triggers

Know your audience

This is very important — it is really, really difficult to make a video that everyone will enjoy. Trying to create universal appeal is not only a waste of money but makes planning nearly impossible.

Focus on YOUR audience, whether it’s new parents, high school students, or college freshmen named Ralph. Get hyper-specific.  At ReelSurfer, we draw an actual face for our target demographic and give it a name. That way, we can better visualize the emotions we want him or her to feel, when he or she interacts with our product and videos.

Consider why people share online

The average viewer shares video for a variety of reasons.

Peter Furia from Seedwell nails it when he explains that people share for two major reasons: “a) they altruistically want to share the enjoyment of that video with others or b) they selfishly want to be seen sharing or critiquing that video.”

In the first case, people will share your video if they enjoy it and want others to do the same. This is more likely to happen with videos that make viewers happy, like this amazingly cute dog dressed as a wampug from Star Wars:

In the second case, a person either wants to share a video they don’t like or is hoping to be the person who “discovered” a particular video. A classic example of video that fit this case is Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” which despite being a catchy song was mostly shared for other reasons.

Understand your audience’s viral triggers

The most important aspect of creating a viral video is understanding how to combine the two elements discussed above to understand your audience’s viral triggers. Triggers are what turn your viewer from a passive spectator into someone that will share your content.

Common triggers include videos that are surprising, sexy, or funny, though the rise of sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy have demonstrated that there is a new trend for illuminating, shocking, and nostalgic videos.

Focus on one or two triggers and go “all-in” on them. If you are going to be nostalgic don’t just make a reference to something from the past, and don’t tug at your audience’s heart strings: rip them out!

Go for it like this Microsoft ad:

2: Optimize your video for an online audience

Post your video everywhere

When your goal is to create a viral video, now is not the time to be restrictive — post your content everywhere. Your video should be hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, and your professional content management system.

Submit your links to Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and any other frequently visited site that displays video.

Make it short

Keep your video short — the average viewer watches between 15 – 30 seconds of a video, so lead with the portion of the video that is engaging.

If you have a longer video, use a tool like ReelSurfer to break it down into shareable clips.

Design for remix and meme-ability

Sometimes your initial video is not the one that goes viral, but parodies or memes that are developed from it can become instant hits. One of the best examples of this is the Harlem Shake, where the original video did not become popular, but viewers’ examples of them became a phenomenon.

Provocative thumbnail and proper tagging

Make sure to give your video a provocative thumbnail.

For example, this video (which got over 13 million views) used a thumbnail that was not really even related to the video itself. Maybe you don’t need to be this extreme, but your thumbnail should be interesting: a good thumbnail gets your video clicked on YouTube’s popular video list.

Also, make sure to give your video the proper tagging with description text that helps your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and people who are looking for your video on YouTube.

3: Distribution

Unfortunately, nobody can guarantee that a video goes viral, but one thing we definitely know is that a video cannot go viral if no one sees it. After all the hard work that goes into making your video, put it in a position to succeed. The best way to do this is to create initial small groups of supporters to start your distribution cycle.

Niche influencers

This goes back to understanding your audience. Online publications and bloggers are hungry for content that is interesting for their audiences.

If you are making a video on how to cook the best lasagna in the world, then reach out to all of the Italian food bloggers you can find and include a link to your video. If you can show them how their audience can benefit from the video, they will be more likely to share it.

Celebrity influencers

After getting some niche recognition, the next step is to reach out to influencers with larger built-in distribution networks. These include YouTube celebrities, mainstream bloggers, Twitter celebrities, etc.

These people are harder to reach and are propositioned constantly by PR firms and others like you. So, it’s even more important to demonstrate why their audiences would benefit from your content. Keep your email pitches concise and explain why their audience would care.

Create initial groups of support

The free version of this is sharing with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., but as social feeds become even busier, this is not a guaranteed way to get your videos shared.

You can also use a service like Virool to guarantee your video gets viewed a certain number of times. They use a network of blogs, games and other partners to make sure that real people watch your content. Again, this does not guarantee that your content will be shared or go viral, but it’s a good start.

Summing up

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

As we mentioned above, no one can guarantee that your video will go viral, but we hope these tips will get you on your way to millions of views.

Guest author Neil Joglekar is a co-founder of ReelSurfer, a Y-Combinator funded startup that lets users create viral clips from any video on the web. Neil is a graduate of Stanford University, frequent guest speaker on digital media, and was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Global Shaper. You can find Neil on Twitter @njcar.

Image credit: Harlem Shake Background

Enough, apparently, to win a Facebook-sponsored competition. And to know that it is a fleeting, vulnerable, and fragile event.

“About half of your engagement is in the first 60 minutes,” Optimal’s CEO Rob Leathern told me. “And about three quarters is within the first 180 minutes. That pattern is quite consistent.”

Optimal just recently won a Facebook-sponsored competition among the social network’s preferred marketing developers to create an innovative new marketing product. What Leathern and his crew came up with was the Optimal News Feed Promoter, a tool to spot early virality and enhance it. That helps marketers utilize the organic results of earned media to optimize their spend on paid media — specifically, promoted posts.

It’s a unique social take on automated marketing systems that doesn’t try to help you create viral content. It simply spots when you might have already done so — and then helps you capitalize on it.

“Our system basically takes whatever organic posts are getting traction and sets up rules to amplify and create ad campaigns in real time,” Leathern says. “You don’t want to waste money on things that don’t have potential, so instead of spending your money across everything … you can just let the data show you which posts you should focus on.”

Source: Optimal Social

Facebook post virality over time.

The rules are customizable: Posts can be set to transition to paid campaigns via relative measures such as a percentage of virality or absolute measures such as number of shares or comments. To make the system even more powerful, marketers can stack and layer triggers to build complex logic for automated social media campaigns.

Adding paid exposure to already viral content has a variety of benefits, Leathern says. It ensures that your media dollars are well spent, because the precise audience that you’re marketing to is the one that already indicated an appreciation for the content. In other words, it takes the guesswork out. In addition, adding paid media via promoted posts extends the life of those posts and even has a positive spillover effect on your other earned media.

“Paid media certainly does improve what you do organically,” Leathern says. “Even if it’s just because you’re getting more data, you’re building a virtuous cycle … learning something via organic, using it in paid, and vice versa.”

Optimal works with digital agencies and brands, including Fanscape, which says that Optimal’s news feed promoter product lets their teams “immediately amplify the most viral social interactions with paid media.”

Which just might help you enhance your chances of going viral in a major way.

photo credit: Will Lion via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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Microsoft’s going on the offensive against Samsung’s best-selling Galaxy S III in a new ad focusing on Windows Phone cameras, like the one in Nokia’s Lumia 920.

Smoked by Windows is Microsoft’s fun, social, and viral YouTube campaign targeting iPhone and Android users. But now it’s moving offline and going to network TV — ESPN and CBS — just in time for March Madness.

And Microsoft is taking specific aim at Samsung:

The ads feature Microsoft’s top Windows Phone marketing manager, Ben Rudolph, who told us that he has the best job in Microsoft when we chatted a couple of months ago. It’s his job as director of Windows Phone evangelism to convince hundreds of millions of Android and iPhone users to switch to Windows phone … and he’s pretty persuasive.

But this particular tactic won’t work for long — the new Samsung Galaxy S IV sports a 13-megapixel camera which is bound to be better than the S III’s eight megapixel effort. And likely to best the Nokia 920′s 8.7 megapixel camera too, in spite of the built-in image stabilization that does give the 920 great night-time photos.

Your iPad or Android tablet is really good at a lot of things, but for some things, paper just can’t be replaced, as one French company hilariously illustrates in this ad, which has gone viral:

The ad is by the Leo Burnett agency for a French company, Le Trèfle, which produces — of course — toilet paper. It has already gathered 62,000 likes, including about 10,000 just in the past 50 minutes.

photo credit: bookgrl via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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One of the many undying questions from web publishers, marketers, and regular web users is “what makes something go viral?” which, coincidentally, is also something Microsoft is working on.

Today the company revealed a new research project called ViralSearch that uses a search engine to identify the most popular content on Twitter. ViralSearch scans billions of pieces of information, including news, photos, and video, and assigns a virality rating to the most popular topics based on how the content was shared via Twitter.

The screenshots in the demo make ViralSearch look a lot like a ChartBeat dashboard. However, unlike ChartBeat, ViralSearch is scanning across an entire social network for its data rather than traffic interaction from a single site. Not only that, but the tool can also track contributions from single Twitter users to see what kind of effect they are having on overall sharing. (For instance, you could check out Robert Scoble’s feed to see the impact he has on making a story go viral.)

The tool actually looks really cool and may provide some sort of insight into what it looks like when something does indeed go viral. Unfortunately, ViralSearch is still in testing phase, so you won’t be able to get your hands on it.

Check out the demo video embedded below for a closer look at ViralSearch.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Comedian John Oliver may joke that SnapChat is designed for sending penis pictures, but the company is destined for a lot more.

SnapChat, an app that lets people share fleeting images, has closed $13.5 million in its first round of funding led by Benchmark Capital.

Oliver joked about the popularity of “sexting” while hosting the Crunchies, an awards ceremony that honors achievements in the tech world. SnapChat won the award for “Fastest rising startup” and is heralded as an example of the startup Holy Grail:  viral growth. A report in the New York Times states that the app sends more than 60 million messages a day and has millions of users.

The popular mobile social photo sharing service, based out of Los Angeles,  enables people to share a photo with another person or group of people who can only be viewed for a very short time (a few seconds). The person you send that photo responds with one of their own, which is also only available for a few seconds — hence the name “SnapChat.”

Photo sharing is one of the obsessions of our generation. Whether it is baby pictures on Facebook, a hipster coffee shop on Instagram, roasted chicken with bread on Foodspotting, room decor on Pinterest, or that day’s vintage-inspired ensemble on a fashion blog, taking and posting images is almost second nature. Sometimes, it feels like if no-one documents the moment on the internet, it doesn’t exist.

However, not every photo needs to live forever, which is where SnapChat comes in.

People can send images to their friends that may not merit (or be appropriate) for public, permanent display. A majority of the users are between 13 and 25, and wary of embarrassing content coming back to haunt them later in life. The story of the job-seeker denied a dream job due to a unflattering Facebook photo is something of a modern urban legend.

Speaking of Facebook, SnapChat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy claim that Mark Zuckerberg met with them in December, just before launching its own self-destructing messaging app Poke. The competition has not seemed to diminish SnapChat’s success. The company is now valued at $60 to $70 million.

Rumors arose in December that SnapChat was raising an $8 million round at a $50 million valuation from Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. The rumors were half true, as rumors tend to be.

In fact, it was Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky who spearheaded the financing after hearing about SnapChat from his teenage daughter. Benchmark is also an investor in Instagram, the world-famous photo sharing app that Facebook bought for $1 billion in 2012.

After returns like that, it is no surprise that the firm is going down the rose-lined photo sharing path again.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Screw the flu. It may be a public health emergency as people across the country are sniffling and sneezing their germs into an epidemic, but the flu’s numbers are nothing compared to Keek.com’s.

In a statement issued this morning, Keek.com announced that it not only closed an $18 million deal, but also registered 6 million new users in the past month. That is what I call viral.

Toronto-based Keek is a free social network centered around 36 second videos. People can upload video states updates known as “keeks” through a webcam or smartphone and share them across Keek, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, e-mail, and SMS. They can also post comments, follow friends, receive notifications, send private messages, check out an activity feed, view a leaderboard, and access analytics.

First, we lived in a world of written status updates, followed by photo-sharing, and Keek’s explosive growth could indicate that video-updates are the wave of the very near future.

“The word keek means a short look, a glimpse, a peek and Keek indeed opens a window into other cultures, customs and lifestyles, making the world more accessible in a way only video can,” said  CEO Isaac Raichyk in a statement. “Twitter convinced the world to embrace a micro-blogging format and Instagram demonstrated that a photo sharing social network could thrive. With 200,000 new users joining daily and millions of user-generated videos posted monthly, Keek is doing the same for social video.”

The company was founded in 2011 and first released its apps in March. In September, VentureBeat reported that Keek raised $7 million in its second round of funding to support its promising growth. At the time, Keek users were posting about 66,000 videos per day, and in August, Keek racked up 21 million visits and 250 million page views.

Now just five months later, Keek is tacking on another $18 million, bringing its total capital raised to $30 million. This financing will support its continued growth by expanding the infrastructure to meet the “surging international demand,” as well as accelerate new feature releases.

A significant driver of Keek’s exploding popularity is widespread adoption in Europe, the Middle East, and South America, with 200,000 new users joining daily. The most recent numbers real that Keek now receives 1 billion monthly page views, 75 million monthly visits, 15 million monthly unique visitors, and 4 million monthly user-generated videos.

That is many many millions.

The $18 million in new funding was led by AGF Investments, Pinetree Capital Ltd, and Plazacorp Ventures, with participation from Cranson Capital.

Will Keek methodically and sustainably spread the dogma of video-status updates around the world? Or will it follow the same path as other social startups that saw tremendous user adoption at first, before getting kicked to the curb by consumers who have already moved on to the next big thing?

Read the press release.

Speaking at a BuzzFeed panel in New York yesterday, Twitter co-founder and board member Evan Williams said that reach is a much more important measure:

“The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet.”

Engagement is certainly the metric that matters to marketers: if people don’t see your message, they cannot act on it. But follower count has long been a source of perceived legitimacy for some, and Twitter has previously taken steps to reduce its impact. Twitter even completely hit the reset button on follower account temporarily, after the infamous auto-follow bug.

Joking that he was on the board and shouldn’t say too much, Williams indicated some kind of engagement score may be coming, and that Twitter’s recent strategic shifts to a more-restrictive Twitter API access policy enable better measurement of engagement. If, after all, every Twitter client for consumers is created by the company itself, Twitter could much more easily determine exactly which tweets were requested by users, and make some pretty good guesses about which ones were actually seen and read.

It’s unlikely any new metrics would completely remove follower count from the picture — that would likely cause a huge user backlash, particularly from popular users. And follower counts can be a valuable measure of interestingness, for lack of a better word, as long as it is authentic.

But a new metric which measure virality and reach would certainly be welcome.

photo credit: id-iom via photopin cc

Everyone wants to make their site/product/app/widget go viral. Unfortunately, most of the time when people say that, they mean “I want the world to do all my marketing for me.” Good luck with that.

Let’s start with some wisdom from about 2500 years ago, when mobile apps were long, sharp, and nasty:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

- Ecclesiastes 9:11

In other words, marketing dweeb, going viral has a lot to do with luck. That is, unless your mobile app jumps up and pokes users in the eye. Unless it makes a dent. Unless, in other words, it rocks.

But there are some things you can do to tip the scales of fate. Here’s a quick primer.

Works for one

You desperately want people to share your app, so that user numbers will skyrocket and you can sell the company to Zynga for $500 million dollars six days after launch. But before people share, there needs to be something to share.

That something is value.

Yeah, sorry, but this is the hard part: you gotta actually create something of value to someone. It’s very challenging to get around this almost-always-essential first step. (If you do find a way around it, however, be sure to share it with me, privately.)

You need to have actual value for the first use, because (oddly) there is not just one first user. There are many first users: the genuine first, the first in her circle of friends, the first in his company, the first in her city. Your app needs to be useful for each of these firsts.

Better together

Anything that gets more valuable and useful when there are more users or instances benefits from network effects. The classic example is the fax machine: one is completely useless. The same could be said of a social network — Facebook for one is pretty much a diary. Good luck IPOing that.

Build in value that grows as the user base grows. And do it in two ways.

First, make your user better when she shares something from your app. Give her props, give her warm fuzzies, make her seem hip and cool, or let her give something of value to her friends.

Second, make the service more valuable for every user when he shares with his friends. When we all got Hotmail email addresses back in the 90s (remember HoTMaiL), we could communicate better. When all of your family is on Path, you stay in touch easier.

Built-in, not bolted on

Social is not a plug-in, nor is it an API. Social is an essential layer or a core component of a viral app.

Draw Something may be going the wrong way right now, but it’s still a great example. The app absolutely requires social interaction, leading users to, in some cases, actually force their friends to install the game.

Now that’s viral contagion!

Essentially, this requires thinking of social from the beginning, rather than after you’ve finished your app and just started dreaming about marketing, and then building it in to the user experience.

Chuck the churn

This is not advice for your friendly milkmaid. Instead, it is an exhortation to keep the users you get.

Unless you want to run a continual pyramid scheme, losing users quickly will kill even a hot viral product. The danger is that you will spend your entire business existence running the hamster wheel of simultaneously acquiring and losing users, and never develop a mature, stable, and solid user base which can actually be monetized.

That may not be a problem, of course, if your strategy is just to get acquired in the mad-scramble-for-scale phase. If so, more power to you. Like OMGpop, however, you will have some long-term issues.

To prevent excessive churn, design your app so that it has not only initial value, but also long-term value. And update regularly with little extra gifts of capabilities that existing users will appreciate. Think of them like the chocolates on the pillow at the hotel.

Grounded gamification

Games are great, and gamification brings the best part of games (targets, competition, scoring, and trophies) to processes and events that are not traditionally games. But that doesn’t mean that Microsoft Word should give you points for every TPS report that you remember to put a cover memo on.

Gamification works best when it is not forced, when it feels natural. Gamification elements should emerge from the application rather than be pasted on in a “There, I fixed it” manner. For example, if there are actual achievement levels, or if the achievement is believably real.

I was not impressed in late 2011 when Klout awarded me a new achievement for visiting Klout.com three days in a row when I hadn’t even visited once (besides the time I was awarded). Nike+, on the other hand, is a great example of gamification that rises directly from the core value of the service itself.

Time and chance

In your pursuit of virality, remember the ancient wisdom: “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Position yourself to take advantage of viral effects, but don’t short-change the marketing budget!

Image credits: Contagion, Shutterstock, one cake/Shutterstock, ants/Shutterstock, rusted bolt/Shutterstock, milk churn/Shutterstock, game Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Mobile app development nowadays seems to be be following a fairly regular pattern: Create an infectious iOS app, wait until it gets insanely popular, then launch an almost identical version for Android.

And that’s exactly what Smule is doing with Songify, its popular iOS music creation app. To use the app. users speak into their phones and Songify turns their words into songs, bending and layering them over a variety of instrumental tracks.

The recipe is simple, entertaining, and successful: Songify has been downloaded 9 million times by iOS users who’ve used the app to create 120 million songs.

Songify itself is free, but offers users the ability to buy a variety of  beats packs to expand their options. (Hello, monetization.)

Smule picked up the rights to Songify last year when it acquired Khush, Songify’s original creators. The move was a smart one, as it combined the efforts of two very like-minded, music-focused teams.

As Khush CEO Prerna Gupta told CNET last year, the strategy behind the pre-acquisition Khush is ”to make less money but from more people.” And launching on Android is probably the best way to do that.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Jonah Peretti, who co-founded both the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, has spent a lot of time thinking about what makes content go viral. Today, he shared some lessons on-stage at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco — and in the process, offered some thoughts on the difference between how Google and Facebook look at the world.

One of the key things to understand, Peretti said, is that “content spreads for different reasons on different platforms.” Google’s search engine is built around information. Sites like About.com are perfectly optimized for Google, because they’re “knowledge-centric” and “keyword-centric”.

Things work very differently on social networks like Facebook. Users are less likely to share how-to articles and more likely to share content that’s funny or that they identify with. As Peretti put it, on Facebook, users share things that “define you and make you look good.”

As an example, Peretti talked about a funny photograph of two basset hounds running that was posted on BuzzFeed. There’s no useful information in the photo, so from the perspective of Google, it has very little value. Yet the photo has received more than 45,000 Facebook “likes”.

In other words, he said, publishers who want their content to go viral need to stop thinking about it as “information to get into people’s heads” and more as “an excuse for social action”.

“This is something Google struggles to understand with their content initiatives,” Peretti said. (It will be interesting if Google’s new social effort, +1, bucks this trend.)

He also talked a bit about how these ideas have influenced BuzzFeed, which operates a site for viral content and also offers tools for publishers to measure viral lift. The company has really focused on viral lift as the new measure of success, rather than straight pageviews, Peretti said. And it takes the social idea even further in a redesign that he previewed today. Instead of dividing the content into traditional topic areas like “politics” and “sports”, it’s divided by users’ reactions: “LOL”, “OMG”, “Fail”, and so on.

[photo by Dean Takahashi]